Interviewee: Carmel Drewes
Interviewer: Lindsey Gaydos
Category: BACH Oral History
Location: Telephone interview: BSR Station, Providence, RI and Carmel's House, Austin, TX
Date: March 12, 2006
Interview Length: 01:33:56
Word count: 14,616
[00:00:01]
Lindsey Gaydos: Okay, so, let's see, okay...So my name's Lindsey Gaydos, and I'm interviewing Carmel, or well actually, can you say your name...
[00:00:09]
Carmel Drewes: Carmel Drewes
LG: And I'm located in the BSR station in Providence, and you are located in...
[00:00:16]
CD: Austin, Texas.
[00:00:17]
LG: Great, okay. Um, so why don't you start off telling me a little bit about yourself, like where you were born and how you ended up coming into the co-ops.
[00:00:27]
CD: Okay, I grew up in Washington state, north of Seattle just south of Canada, and then I went to school, obviously, at Brown. And, my first year lived in the dorms, I lived in Perkins, and it was fine, but it wasn't really kind of the atmosphere that I wanted to live in for my next couple years. And I was friends with a lot of people that lived in co-ops because I worked at the Ivy Room and a lot of people, at least at that point and I would guess probably still now, a lot of co-opers that worked for UFS worked at the Ivy Room because it's vegetarian and a little bit funkier than some of the other places. So I ended up hanging out in the co-ops because I knew these other people that were older and already living in them. So my friend and I applied, we actually applied into the co-op lottery, and then into West House. And we got into West House and we didn't get into the co-ops, but we got word, because you know I had all these friends in there, and they said, Well you have a lottery number that's really good and it's likely that people will drop out and that you'll get in. And, so we hinged our bets on the co-ops, and we did end up getting in, which was good because we had to turn down West House. And my freshman year roommate, I don't know if this a rumor or not, but because I never did the housing lottery, but she said, You had the lowest lottery number that there was [laughs]. And I was like oh my God, I'm really glad that I did these other things, because I would have been living in somewhere horrible, in like the Grad Center with seven other people in a suite or something. But, um, yeah so we got in and that was good. [LG: So, can you...] And...oh, did you have a question?
[00:02:16]
LG: Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, I was just saying, um, can you explain how or what the lottery process was for getting in to the co-ops?
[00:02:24]
CD: Oh, wow. I can't remember exactly, you had to go to two meetings at two different houses, and get your name on a list, and you know, register with the housing coordinator, I think. And then, that's what I seem to remember - I don't know if it's really true, but that's what I remember. And then they did some magical lottery process and then came up with a list of the people who were in and then the people who were, you know, everybody was rated after that. So, even though, even though you weren't above the line for getting in, I don't remember how many slots there were, I want to say there were about sixteen or something people that were definitely in and then other people that were in line to get in if they changed their minds or left for whatever reason or if somebody else who was already in the co-ops decided not to live there. And, I don't know. We found out pretty soon afterwards that we'd gotten in, before the end of the school year, so, we didn't end up, some people get notified over the summer or even right at the beginning of the new school year that they're going to get a space, but we knew about it before hand, and then had to go to....and I don't remember how it was divided up and decided who got into which houses. It was pretty much assigned. It may have been that the original sixteen people or however many were on that original list, got to get together and sort of fight it out and decide which houses they were going to be in, but when we were contacted it was because there was a space opening up in Finlandia, which they called New House at that point. And so we didn't really get any choice in which of the houses we lived in; we just got assigned to there.
[00:04:19]
LG: So, which houses were....or, um, what year was this? Sorry.
CD: Ninety...five.
LG: '95, okay, and so which houses...?
CD: So all four houses were there at that point.
[00:04:31]
CD: It was the second year, well the year that I moved in, which would have been the fall of '95 was the first year that Finlandia had sort of a full slate of residents. The year before was the year that they had first opened and they had five or six people, some small number like that that were living there just to get the house up and running - that my year was the first kind of full force year.
[00:05:02]
LG: Okay, and so, can you talk about what...what your role in the co-op was, how, you know, how you got involved and what happened as you lived there?
[00:05:12]
CD: Sure. Um, well, everybody obviously had their house job that they had to decide upon and I don't remember whether we did that at our first meeting of the year or at our pre-meeting that happened before the summer, probably at our first meeting in the Fall where we all had to pick roles, and I opted to be on the board, I guess because not a lot of people wanted to, and I kind of like being in charge, so I said oh that's good, I'd like to know more about what's going on, and have a better idea, and I already had friends, uh my friend Holly was the coordinator at the time, and she was also another supervisor at the Ivy Room. So I knew her, and it didn't feel terribly intimidating to think about being on the board and getting to hang out more with some of the people that I already knew that lived in the other houses. And so, I was secretary for my first year, and right after I moved in, that Fall was when the announcement went out that the university was terminating the leases on Milhous and Carberry, so that was a big thing that we dealt with that whole year. And I remember taking insanely copious meeting minutes where I was having to type, I don't remember whether I was typing them in, probably not, I was probably writing it down and then had to go back and transcribe it later. Writing down everybody, what everybody said, we had these full co-op meetings in the living room at Carberry, which was a big huge space, and we were all crammed in there, fifty-some people, and it was, you know, this person said I think we should tell the university to screw themselves, and this person said I think we should walk away, and this person said, we should fight 'til the end, and this person said, we should have a bake sale, and going on and on [laughs] of all this stuff. And we had a couple of those that I remember having to do minutes for, and I wish that I still had my college computer because it would be fun to dig those up, and I'm sure that they're kind of long gone even though there was a copy at some point in the BACH office.
[00:07:32]
And then the second year that I lived in the co-ops I was the coordinator. And that was the, I mean, I think it was the craziest year but that's probably [laughs] because I was trying to be in charge of all these things and it, there was a lot going on. That was the year that we did, so it was the year '96-'97, and we did the final negotiations with the university, we decided to let go of the houses. We'd been trying to decide whether we were going to really fight for them and it just seemed in our best interest not to, because the university had so much power in the situation and, they weren't being up front about why they wanted them. They said that they needed the office space and then they sat vacant for five years at least or they might still be vacant right now. I'm not sure whether they've ever put offices into them, but really they just didn't want to be our landlord, which, if you think about, is pretty reasonable. The university has huge liability and certain standards that they need to maintain, and the co-ops are run completely differently and they're a distributed kind of organizational system and not a centralized organizational system and people are allowed to make their own decisions and it's this fabulous model that is really good but really hard for a bureaucracy to oversee and be a part of. And I think that was, we all, or most of us kind of came to that understanding by the end of the first year of the lease negotiations, where it was just... we as much as we wanted those houses because they were the first houses they're just...they're beautiful architecture, they had such rich history, they were bigger than the other ones, they were so nicely located. All of those things. We knew that it was kind of a dysfunctional relationship from the start, and the university was never going to sell them to us, which would have been the ideal solution although I don't know where we would have found the money to buy them. But, um, for as long as we continued to be their tenants, we were going to have to play by the university game or at least pretend that we were and that was just nearly impossible for us to do and still maintain what we wanted to be able to maintain. And they, because they weren't happy with us, because we didn't mow the lawn every week, and we didn't necessarily do the paint upkeep and there was weird yard art and people in dreadlocks sitting around without their shirts on playing drums, and things like that, you know [laughs] are sort of what it's all about, but not really what the school wanted to have in property that they were responsible for. And so, you know, we just knew that it was going to continue, if we did manage to negotiate a couple more years of the lease with them that they would be probably pretty miserable years and full of a lot of strife and headache and not really worth our time. So, we had to cut our losses on it as unfortunate as that is in a lot of ways and said that we were better off going in our own, moving in our own direction, and really focusing on the two houses that we owned and looking for opportunities to expand beyond that in, but within areas where we maintained the control ourselves.
[00:11:05]
LG: Right. Um could you talk about, what you do, you did felt it was all about? I mean that's a general thing, but um, like, you know you talked about moving in a specific direction and how the co-ops felt, and certainly that involved ownership, but could you talk more about how you felt what that direction was?
[00:11:22]
CD: Um, I'm not sure I totally understand the question. Um, that, what I personally felt the direction for the co-ops was or what the university's direction was..?
[00:11:32]
LG: What you felt the co-op and like the general feeling in the co-op was and that it should go in...like what the values were.
[00:11:39]
CD: Um, I think that the values really were around kind of self determination and the ability for us to decide what was going to happen within our own space: to have our own space and control it, not in a controlling manner, but manage it and make decisions, and the freedom to make mistakes about things, and have that not be a huge and horrible event that led to chastisement from an outside source. That, that things where we could learn and have opportunities to grow as people learning about how to live and work in a group and how to manage a property and how to deal with weird personal issues that come up; people that don't pay their rent and things like that. So, to be able to really be self-determining and to do thing in a non-traditional way and have the space to try that out even the things that didn't work, to give them a chance, and really kind of know, ah well, this really radical idea is a great one, and this really radical idea doesn't work at all for us. So I think that was really what we wanted, and we did want to get bigger. We always had more people interested in the co-ops than we had spaces for, so it was really hard to cut our membership more than in half between those couple years. But it was just sort of seen as something that was necessary at the time in order for us to keep BACH running the way we wanted it to and keep the coops with the meaning that we wanted them to have, and to not have them be really controlled. I remember that we always made a lot of analogies to West House, and West House is great and like I said I had applied to live there and I know a lot of people who lived there and it, it is really good, but they had things like the university fire alarms and exit signs, and um, key card swipe at the door and things like that. And we just, not that there's anything wrong with that, and I think West House gives a really good space for people to have a really concerted environmental focus which although it sort of comes out in the coops it doesn't have to and it doesn't necessarily and that's a really good space for that group to have those opportunities but, it wasn't what we wanted. We wanted to be more outside of the system and not trying to work within the system because we just didn't see that, that the way the university needs to run things and we understood the way they need to run things, we just didn't feel that that was going to work for us.
[00:14:36]
LG: Could you talk about the organizational structure of how it functioned, of how the co-ops functioned?
[00:14:43]
CD: Sure, we had the board of directors, which is what I, I think it was the board of directors...Now I don't remember because I work for a nonprofit now and our board is the board of directors, but I can't imagine that it was called anything else. So that was the coordinator, and secretary, treasurer, housing coordinator, maintenance coordinator, we might have had a sort of second in command, like a, like a, I don't think we had a vice coordinator thing or something like that, but we might have had something, and a couple members at large. So we met monthly or more frequently as needed, and made decisions about what was going to happen within the university setting, and I mean within the coop setting, and what we were, what we were doing what we were planning what we needed. And then while I was there we created the board of advisors and that was sort of a supplemental group that was intended to meet twice a year, and for a while after I graduated I served as an alumni rep on that board. And that was made up of more roles that wouldn't change so frequently. The board of directors changed pretty much yearly. Sometimes you'd have somebody who was on the board for two or maybe three years, but it was infrequent and if they were they usually weren't in the same position for those years. So, there was a lot of relearning time and a lot of changeover and a lot of we're going to do things this way and now we have somebody new and we're going to do things this way and now we have somebody new and we're going to do things another way, and, so the board do advisors was meant to give a little bit more stability, a little bit longer institutional memory, and it was made up of what did we have, we had, something like two alumni representatives, two representatives from the general providence community, two representatives from the Brown community, that might have been it. Maybe a couple more, I don't remember the exact structure of that board, but it was intended to draw in some of our friends who were professionals that worked in Providence or members of the faculty or administration who were interested in the co-ops and sympathetic to them, so that we did have a little bit broader scope of ideas that were contributing to the decisions that were being made. And I don't know if that is really still functioning or not, like I said I was an alumni rep for a couple years and then...
[00:17:33]
LG: What years?
CD: Um, 'til 2000-ish, 'cause I was in Austin when I had my last conversation with somebody about trying to figure out a time to do a board of advisors meeting, so that would have been 2000 or 2001...somewhere around there.
[00:18:00]
LG: So, could, uh...I know that you said that your memory is a little foggy about the structure of the board of advisors but what do you think, you said that there were representatives from the Providence community, what was the interaction between the coops and that advisory relationship and greater Providence or greater than co-op people?
[00:18:20]
CD: Well, we always have a lot of friends that are out in the general community, a lot of them were in coops or had friends who were in the coops at some point or went to Brown and knew of the coops and things like that. So it, um, was, sort of, I mean that was good, they weren't just general we're going to open up the door and anybody from Providence can walk in and talk to us or things like that. We were selective about, these are people that we know and they like us and also have some interesting contributions to make to the conversation. In terms of sort of within the overall Providence community I think that most of Providence doesn't know about the coops. And we dealt a lot with the city bureaucracy during the years that was there, they were obviously not part of our board of advisors, but that in ninety...six? I think? Yeah, the summer of '96, was when the city condemned Finlandia and we all had to move out that summer and do a lot of renovations in order to get it up to code and move back in and then the fall, that fall, of '96 was when Milhous got shut down, after the fire, the foam party, there was no actual fire there was just fear of potential fire evidently on the part of the fire department. And so...that was, Milhous was shut down for a weekend and so the city of Providence definitely knew us at that time. And that was why we worked that into this board of advisors to sort of show - we're a part of the city, too, and we want to know what "Resident X" has to say and thinks about us. But in reality of course, we with the people that we were able to find to be on our board of advisors who, I don't even remember exactly who they were right now. I think that maybe someone from AS220, which was just getting started at that point, or at least that was someone that we were approached. I'm not sure, not sure if he agreed. Folks like that, that are, you know, within the Providence community but still in kind of a subset of the Providence community that's more interested in ideas like this.
[00:21:04]
LG: Um, so, could you talk about the closing of Milhous and the party that you mentioned... [laughs]
[00:21:11]
CD: Sure [laughs], yes it was the Halloween party, it was called, fittingly enough, it was billed as the "Death of Milhous" party because Milhous was famous for its Halloween parties and this was to be the last one because of the lease termination. So, it was '96, the Fall of '96, and we were at the party, it was great, it was this huge, Milhous, you know, three stories, they had bands downstairs and then they had stuff on the second floor and the third floor in the common areas and on the third floor someone had, and there's a, there's a recount of this all actually, on the, either on the...that Matt Obert put together that used to be on the AS220 website. So that's a pretty, it's going to be, that account is much more elaborate than what I will recall, because he talked to people right afterwards and has a lot of direct quotes and information, but in the third floor area, there was space...Milhous had this interesting set up where there was space between the front stairway and the back stairway. So there was a front staircase that went up and there were bedrooms all around it and the bathrooms, and then there was a back staircase that went up and I think that there were bedrooms around that one, too. And then there was this dead zone in the middle of the house on the second floor and the third floor, which was sort of just an empty room that you had to go through and I think that people had various kind of couches and bookshelves and things in there, it was just sort of extra living space. So on the third floor they cleared everything out and covered the walls and the floor with foam, like uh, packing foam...I don't remember who got it or where it came from, but it was cut up into interesting shapes and the idea was that you could go and play in the foam and throw it around and all of these things that sound like a great idea at the time [laughs] and then maybe, maybe not so much, maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, who's to say? It ended up not going so well for us in this case, but [coughs] we, the real problem came in when one of the bands brought a fog machine or smoke machine something like that to use during their set and they hadn't told us about this or if they had told someone then it hadn't made the word around to everybody else, and so we didn't know that this was coming, and, but of course, we were like, oh this is cool, there's a smoke machine. Well it's cool until it sets off the fire alarm, then it's not so great. So I was on the second floor hanging out with some folks in the room, whatever, and then the alarms went off, and I just kind of thought, Oh shit, [laughs], I do not want this to be happening, because I was the coordinator at the time and I'd already had all these run-ins with the city over Finlandia over the summer, and I'd been in lease negotiations with Walter Holmes, the vice president of administration all year, and it was kind of, not how I wanted my Halloween to go [laughs].
[00:24:20]
So, we all dutifully filtered outside and, you know, went to the front, and I met with the fire people, and I met with the police, and somebody said, oh, you know, here's so-and-so, that they were dragging over there from the band, and they can attest to the fact that it's a smoke machine or a fog machine, whatever it was. Nobody was lighting anything on fire, nothing's burning down, it's all good....but they're there, so they said well we have to do a check through to make sure everything's okay. So they come to this...[laughs]...rr...room..[laughs] of foam on the third floor and they were extremely unimpressed by it, mostly because it was kind of blocking the fire doors that existed so that the doors between the two stairwells were fire doors and they were kind of hard to open, and you had to sort of squash them in and squeeze through them to get around into the foam, and then they said, well, you know, if this foam caught on fire, you would just like, all of Providence would die [laughs], we would all be dead, the house would explode in the moment or whatever it was, and um, we, of course, always willing to fight a losing fight, afterwards the person who had gotten the foam called the people who made the foam and found out that it doesn't actually burn, it just sort of melts, and it's not toxic, or whatever, and all this stuff is in Matt's report, because he's got the whole transcript of the phone conversation between those parties. But that you know, we had no bargaining power at that point, and nothing that we could do. So, we said okay, we're in trouble and they said, you gotta clear out now, like nobody can be in this house until this is dealt with and we approve it to go back in and so people rounded up stuff and headed over. Lots of folks, most folks went to Carberry, and I think a couple folks went to Watermyn, and Finlandia was closed at that point, so that wasn't an option. People moved in to campus dorms with their friends or something, and we got the house back open in a couple days, and it wasn't a, you know, it wasn't the end of the world but it was still sort of another black mark against us and a little bit of a stain on our reputation, like, oh look at what those kids are doing now, of course we can't trust them with this or that or whatever, and
[00:26:44]
But it, we always looked at it as, well regardless, of what happened, look at the fact that within a weekend we had fifty people mobilized and dealing with all this stuff and cleaning the houses out, getting rid of the foam, because I think that they also along with citing us for the foam they said oh and by the way we also found x and x and x and x and x and a various long list of things that were not up to compliance and not the way they should be. And, we just pulled people together and then in a couple days said okay, here you go, everything's the way it needs to be, and they kind of went, oh well, okay, I guess so, now you get to move back in...So that was that...grand adventure and tremendously fabulous weekend.
[00:27:29]
LG: So, can you talk more about, like the, um, timeline of things that happened during while you were BACH coordinator?
[00:27:38]
CD: Sure, the lease stuff was mostly...Well it went on and on, but a lot of the initial things happened during the fall of '95, that was when the announcement went out to the whole, every, all the members of the co-ops, and I think to the alumni to say that the university had terminated the lease, we were in I think the first or second year of a five year lease, and they said we're not waiting until, and we never understood why they didn't just not renew our lease at the time before, why they renewed our lease and then decided to cancel it in the midst of it. We've never figured out what happened there, but something happened and made them change their minds. Um, so the word went out and the big mobilization effort to figure out what we wanted to do what we wanted to try to do how much we wanted to kind of fight this decision and try to keep the houses or how much we wanted to go in a different direction and move away from those houses. What we would want to get from the university in terms of compensation if we did agree to move out, all of these things were having to be decided. And there were lots of meetings, and of course there were really emotional meetings because of course you can look at it really logically and detached that these were houses where people had lived for a long time and they had tremendous histories, there were things written on the walls that had been there since the '70s, and murals and, just incredible stuff that there was no way to move to another location or to really capture or maintain and we knew that that history was going to be lost. And that that was, you know, not the end of the world, but gonna' be really sad for all of us and have an effect on the co-ops, not that they wouldn't still go on but that they would have a shorter tradition and a shorter history than they used to, so we dealt with that stuff mostly through the academic year of '95-'96 and that was the year that I was secretary. And then I took over the coordinatorship at the end of the academic year starting at the beginning of the summer, so, like I said before, this was, that was the second year that people had been living in Finlandia, but the first year was sort of a small year with not a lot of people there, just a couple folks that were working on the house and fixing it up and getting it ready and then the big influx of us moved in. I think that were... originally I know that we dropped our capacity in that house down to about fourteen or something, but there were quite a few more...
[00:30:33]
LG: [laughs]
Yeah we were using everything as a bedroom, it was great. Sure, you can sleep in this closet, no problem! [laughs] Yeah, that's uh...I didn't like that very much. So we were kind of unfortunately, there were still a lot things with Finlandia that needed to be dealt with during that year in terms of zoning and bringing things up to code and those just didn't necessarily happen because we were dealing with all this lease stuff and that seemed like a much bigger deal. And we were already, it's, you know, just hard to deal with this stuff that doesn't seem very pressing, and we were already living in the house and so, you know, that must be okay we're living in the house everything seemed fine to us, not a big deal. And then, god it was a horrible day, we had this walk-through inspection. Um, I could look up the date but it was probably...I think it was in June or so, and I remember I was working at...for UFS and so I got off early from my shift and I came back and we had this walk-through with some officials from the city, so I'm like wearing my I look like an adult kind of clothes or at least what I had that somewhat resembled I look like an adult kind of clothes at that point in my life. And these four or so older men, I swear to god that one of them was wearing a powder blue polyester suit, and I don't know if that's just my memory of it or if it really was that I really think that he was. So these guys show up at our door, and so I'm just like fatally optimistic, and I'm going okay this is great, I'm gonna' show them this thing, and they're going to be really interested and we're going to show them the work that we've done and how we've made some changes, and it's this cool unique model of living and all of this stuff. And so I'm walking them through the house and this is this, this is our kitchen, and this is where...our dining room and these are the bedrooms and living rooms and all this stuff, and the first floor, the second floor, the third floor, the basement, this is our storage are... Alright, these guys are totally not impressed. They are in fact opposite of impressed. They are just horrified. They were completely aghast at the way that we were living, and we really did. We had people that were living in well, things that were essentially closets that were these small rooms, and the floor plan and layout of that house was really changed in the next six to nine months after that when we did all the renovations so it's hard to conceptualize. But, on the third floor for example there were two doubles and two singles. One of them was this tiny room next to the bathroom that I don't know whether it still exists or not, and then we had four doubles on the second floor, we had a single on the first floor, we had somebody who was in that front living room... that on the, not right on the corner but more on the kitchen side. So that was a bedroom, and then in the basement we had two bedrooms. One was a big room right underneath that first floor bedroom and the other was this sort of smaller room underneath where the kitchen is. If we had any fire doors in the house, we had maybe one, and if we, I think we had some kind of smoke alarm system, but it was probably just ceiling smoke detectors and things like that. And they just, just cited us left and right. And said that you know this is completely unsafe, your stairways aren't enclosed. Oh we had that great, we had these fabulous stairways, that staircase that faces um not Watermyn, but what's that other street that is right there...?
[034:43]
LG: Brook?
CD: Yeah, the stairway that faces Brook was all this wood structured architecture and it was open, so that's the one that went not all the way up to the third floor but just between the first and the second, and it was completely open from the second floor, so you could look out, and that, we had that stained glass window in there, it was just gorgeous, we were so excited we loved it. And they said, you know, if you're going to have this many people in house then you have to qualify as a boarding house, you have to meet all the boarding house rules, you have to have enclosed stairways you have to have a comprehensive fire alarm and sprinkler system that's tied into the city of Providence, and you have, you can't have people living in the basement and you can't have people living in small closets and you can't have people living on the first floor, and I don't even remember the reason that you couldn't have people living on the fist floor but you couldn't! And you have to have an industrial kitchen with an industrial stove with a smoke hood, and just this long long list of things. And I'm sort of sitting there going, Oh my god oh my god, and they said and the house is condemned and you all have to move out until you make these changes. It's was like [laughs] I'm only 19, what do you want me to do here!? So, I said, Okay, well we'll get right on that, and they slapped this big red condemned sticker on the door, "condemned as dangerous and unsafe"; we loved that thing. We have lots of pictures of it. [laughs]. We were like woo, look at us [laughs]. And, we had something like 24 or 48 hours just to move out we had to move everything out we had to move people out, so I immediately called sort of an emergency convening of anybody. This is in the summer right, nobody's even around. So, first of all a lot of people are summer coopers, so they're maybe not even the people that usually live in the coops they just found a summer room. And then, where is the board of directors? And some of them are around - I think Holly was in China, and people were just all over the place and unreachable but...we did get, again, that sort of that like when there's a crisis, coopers can mobilize like nobody's business, and everybody pulled together and they found space in Milhous, they found space in Carberry. I lived in the BACH office, which was this little tiny room in Milhous. We somehow managed to get a bed into it but that was about all that fit in it, and it was on the third floor of Milhous and really was the width of a twin bed plus maybe three feet. So I lived there for the summer and people just sort of divided up and scattered to the winds and some folks moved out into apartments and ended up not ever moving back into the coops and things like that. But, then we took a look at this huge laundry list of things that we had to deal with in the house and just started. I started interviewing contractors and, you know, at least we had kind of the sense to realize that there was no way that we would get that stuff done on our own. We...there were some things that we could do and that we tried to do, and we did end up actually doing some parts of the work. We were lucky to find a contractor team, Creative Construction, and it was this father/son team out of Warwick or somewhere like that, and they would, they first of all gave us the only kind of with...at all within our realm to pay bid. The bigger construction firms gave us, and I don't remember what the dollar sign bids on, were on these, but the big firms gave us these bids that were just outrageous and there was absolutely no way that we could even consider paying that much money and we were freaking out. But then this smaller, uh smaller business and they said, no we can do it for this much, and it was some amount that was actually reasonable for us, and they were willing to work with us so we did a lot of the demolition of some things on our own and various things that we could do in order to help make the cost a little bit less. But it is very good that we hired professionals because it would have taken five years...[laughs]
[00:39:17]
It would have to just be opening now if we had been just reliant on ourselves to do it, because people, we all had so much energy and desire to do things that as students you're really busy and you generally have not only academics but a whole lot of other things that are going on. And interests can be kind of fleeting from time to time, so it was good to get some outside folks involved in a long term process like that. And it's something that needed, well, needed to not be too long term a process, but that needed real considerable amount of effort over more than three days, which is I think kind of the lifespan of a good coop rally, where you can really pull a lot of people together and they can work their asses off for about three days and then the rest of their lives intervene and they just, it's just not feasible any more. So that was, summer and fall of whatever year that was, '96, and then, um I don't remember when the lease, actual lease agreement was signed. We ended up, I lived in Milhous for the fall semester and then we did get Finlandia back open with a small group. We were only allowed to open up the rooms on the second floor, I think we had like six people, and it was just this bizarre set up, because in order to be sustainable, we had a huge number of food coopers. So we had this small number of people who were living in the house that we needed a large number of people to be going in on the meals, so we had all of these food coopers, which made a really interesting dynamic because they weren't necessarily as invested in the house, but they also had a lot of ideas, and things that...Yeah, that was a strange year, it was not very cohesive in terms of the group. Most of the people that I'm really close friends with still from the co-ops were from that first year that I lived in Finlandia where we were a bigger group and we had more kind of a house unity. And the second year was kind of just a little bit strange, and then my senior year, I food cooped at Watermyn but I lived in an apartment and Finlandia got back up to I think about the same capacity that it has right now during that year. They were able to open up a few more rooms and bring more people in and the house stabilized a little bit more after that.
[00:42:00]
LG: Mmhmm, and what prompted your decision to leave?
CD: Um, I needed a break. [laughs] I needed to not be responsible for anything more than my own space and getting my laundry done and things like that. It just is a real high burn out...I think, because you dedicate, you give so much time and energy into it, and then it can just be really overwhelming, and I did spend so much of that year, my junior year, I was either in lease negotiations or I was over working on Finlandia or I was talking to people over at the city of Providence about code. And I just needed to not be doing that for a while. So I moved out, into an apartment and then I missed it, so I food cooped at Watermyn and just lived in my apartment. And I still had, you know, I still knew a lot of people there from the fact that I had lived there during the previous fall. So that was a great way to not quit cold turkey from the whole coop thing but still have a way to be involved and to be part of it, but to be able to kind of go home at the end of the day, and not have to spend 24 hours a day dealing with things that came up.
[00:43:31]
LG: And how do you feel that that experience influenced your ability to...like how do you feel your experience in the coops influenced you as a person?
[00:43:45]
CD: Oh I think it was huge, I mean it taught me a lot about construction [laughs]. Things that I've done when I bought a house a couple years ago I was like, Oh my house that needs work, no problem because I know how to get things done or to find the people that get things done. But you know more importantly than that it taught me a lot about people and working with people and the interrelations and how is it people get things done and in what contexts people don't get things done and things like that. Which I think are just really useful skills to have and useful things. And I really have always just been interested in the cooperative set up as a business model or a living model or in whatever context it lives out, I think that it's a really fabulous way to run things. And it was nice to have some hands on experience with that. I think that, you know like I said, that when you're in a living coop situation and living it 24 hours a day that can be pretty intensive, and can burn you out a little bit. But, it's certainly taught me a lot of things that I've carried over and looked at for more business situations. And I, you know, in Austin, I go to our local bookstore that's an anarchist-run coop bookstore and I go to our food coop and things like that. Because...and I understand why things might be a little bit more disorganized and it doesn't bother me and you know those sorts of things that you realize after having lived that experience that to other people they think, Oh well why isn't there this and why isn't there that and why doesn't the food coop have more of a selection of these things or why are they making the decisions that they're making? And it's easier to understand it once you've been involved in it.
[00:46:00]
LG: And did that, uh, what did you end up doing after, like what did you study at Brown and what did you end up doing after you left?
[00:46:08]
CD: I studied psychology and women's studies. And the year after I graduated, year and a half after I graduated I stayed in Providence and I worked at the Women's Center of Rhode Island, as a shelter advocate, and then I left the country and traveled for about nine months in Central America. Spent three months in Costa Rica traveling by bike with a former Watermyn resident and another friend of ours and then spent the rest of the time traveling by bus up through the countries up to Guatemala. And then moved to Austin and I work for a nonprofit that does migrant and immigrant public health related issues.
[00:47:02]
LG: And did you maintain any connection, you said you were on the alumni board, but did you do anything else with the coops while you were living in Providence but not in Brown?
[00:47:11]
CD: Um, not really, there was the alumni board and, you know, I'm trying to remember whether I even really knew people that were still living there at that point. I go and stop by and visit whenever I'm in town, but I think that when I was living there I don't think that I was terribly involved in what was going on, no.
[00:47:38]
LG: And could you, okay, so, can you talk a little bit about the gender and racial make up of who was in the coops while you were there?
[00:47:48]
CD: Sure, if I can remember. I think it was more women than men, but not hugely so, or at least that's my recollection. Well, let me think about who lived in Finlandia. In Finlandia my first year there were three or four guys and the rest were women, so yeah it was more women than men and I think that that was probably pretty true across the board. The racial make up was pretty white and that was something that we always kind of struggled with wanting to have more diverse houses but just had a hard time recruiting people that that weren't from, not a completely homogenous background, but people who tend to be involved or interested in coops tend to be people who had some kind of exposure to that model when they were younger. Or you know so they're...they come from families who were involved in progressive social movements or the local community food coop or whatever it was, and so this idea is not totally foreign to them. And one of my friends said that she felt like the fact that, so that it was all vegetarian was a real limiting factor that would, you know, that could have a play out racially or ethnically if there were different groups who were more accustomed to eating meat and wanted to be eating meat regularly and would be a little put off by the vegetarian nature of it. There's also sort of the living in community and with a bunch of ruckus people. If you grew up in a large family or a low income area, and these are all just sort of speculations that we had about why things might not be more diverse than they were, but it was that if you had grown up in sort of a more community living situation already, like extended family, or a couple families having to live together in order to make ends meet, then it's not as appealing to look at this kind of setting for living and it's much more appealing to live somewhere where somebody else cleans your bathroom every, you know, week or couple days or however often they clean the bathrooms in the dorms and where someone else is doing the maintenance and someone else is taking care of things. If you grew up in a kind of setting where you had to be doing that, it's not this novel thing that it was for a lot of us who had grown up in fairly traditional single family residences and, you know, Wow this is cool that I get to decide how to deal with this broken sink [laughs]. And other people are like I've been dealing with broken sinks for a long time and I'd rather not. So it was and the houses weren't all white, but they were mostly, most people that were living there were white, so I don't know if that's changed at all, in the years since. But, I know it was something that we talked a lot about and we were really concerned about, but that we just didn't, we hadn't found a way to over come it and hadn't figured out what would be needed in order to make those changes.
[00:51:40]
LG: Um, so you touched about on it a little, but could you talk a bit about the issue of class in the coops? I mean a lot of what you're talking about isn't just racial but more like based on class and if you guys had issues about affordability or like what that meant for the mission of the coop?
[00:51:58]
CD: Yeah, um, it's true, most of those things that I was talking about under the kind of racial category are much more class based, which, you know, in the US, tends to kind of play out racially although it's not 100%. I think that the coops are really appealing to people who did need to save money, for whatever reason. Most people that were there were working and this was a really good option to save some costs, so people who weren't having their whole college education financed by their parents, just sort of flat like, Yeah here's however much money it costs, and here's my credit card, and you go do whatever you want, so not that kind of folks, but, because of those other sort of class related or economically related issues of growing up that I mentioned before, I think that it also sort of cut out people who had grown up in situations where their families were really struggling economically. Because, even though it was cheaper than living in the dorms and eating on meal plan, I think it has a lot of resemblance to struggling economically in some ways and that that's probably not very appealing if you've been living that. And it's okay if you are doing that as this kind of social experiment while you're in college and trying it out, but not feeling like that was how you grew up and not feeling like that was how you were going to end up. And I think that that kind of made it more appealing to people who had grown up with fairly stable economic situations, but were not in so wealthy a situation or for whatever reason that they're, they didn't have to worry about funds at all during school.
[00:54:12]
LG: How involved do you feel like people that were in the coops were involved with whether Brown or RISD groups or the greater Providence community at large? Were there more activists? What kind of people tended to be involved, or what sort of things were people involved with?
[00:54:32]
CD: I think that people generally were involved in a myriad of different things. There obviously were a lot of artists, a lot people who were doing kind a lot of alternative art, a lot of performance art and things like that happening. I mean I think that if you have an interest in living in a group setting that you generally tend to be the kind of person who's involved in other groups who's already involved in some groups when you...before you enter the coops and who has that as a sort of central function and liking the idea of community. And even though you're living in this cooperative community most people had other communities either where they were working or where they were doing art or music or political activism or things like that that were outside of the coops but had some overlap with them. And spanning the gamut in terms of what people were interested in and doing politically, you know, progressive causes but running the whole range of progressive environmental causes, progressive social causes. We didn't have a war to protest at that point so that wasn't coming out, but people were always finding something to...there's always something to protest. So there was plenty going on and plenty of trying to do a little consciousness-raising and talking about, you know, what in terms of food what do we buy, what do we boycott, what do we allow to be in the house, what do we not want to support. Various issues that would come up along those lines.
[00:56:28]
LG: What sorts of things were you involved with aside from the coop?
CD: I was well I was working so I spent a lot of time at UFS, I was the manager at the Ivy Room for my junior...half of my sophomore and then junior and senior years. And then I worked for as a student consultant at the CIT and those are the things that took up most of my time, I know that there must have been some other stuff that I was doing. I know that eventually I was volunteering at the Women's Center, which is where I ended up working after I got through college. I was involved in a couple other sort of student organizations earlier on that I kind of dropped when I started getting having the coops taking up a lot of my time.
[00:57:26]
LG: What do you think made people motivated to like do work in the coops or join the coops? What larger trends like affected the spirit of them that you saw while you were there?
[00:57:36]
CD: I think that I think that the whole idea of everyone working together to get something done is really very appealing. And having these big ideas and that's why those sort of small term projects do work so well, is that you have something that you can see that's really attainable and we need to fix this or we need to deal with this. And we're all going to come together and we're all going to work really hard, and it's going to happen, and when that happens on a small, on a short term scale, even if it's a really a big thing, that's really rewarding. And like I said before sustaining that momentum can be really hard when you're dealing with something that's a longer term project that for the short term things that works really well, and I think that just all of those ideas of being with other people and interdependency on them. I mean, community is such a concept that is kind of lost in a lot of ways, and I think that you lose the real sort of sense of community when you live in the dorms because even though you're forced to live in this sort of faux community with...you're living with all these other people and you're sharing space with them, but you have no interdependence on them and you have no accountability towards them except maybe not really playing your music loud at four in the morning. But if you want to interact with them you can, but you don't have to and it's kind of the way a lot of community is in the US right now. Where you're not, you don't feel a real responsibility for your neighbors necessarily or helping them out, it's like, they're there and if you want to talk to them and say hi to them that's fine, but if you don't then that's no problem. Nothing...and presumably...nothing negative happens, where there's this sense, this outward sense, that nothing negative happens if you don't actually become actively involved in your community. And so I think that that was a lot of the draw and then just the logistics of it were a draw. At least for me getting to actually cook and eat real food instead of...even though I worked for food services I didn't really want to eat that food all the time [laughs]. And, you know, being able to paint your room whatever color you wanted it and have things that you couldn't have in the dorms and that feeling of...You moved form living with your parents which is a situation of course they have some degree of control over the household and things like that, and then you move into the dorms where you're in this like massively controlled situation. And they can control whether you come and go, if your card swipe thing stops working you can't even get into your living space and things like that. And at least for me that was quite a culture shock and not a very positive one. I just didn't want to continue to be in a context where I was...felt like I was living in a hotel, where I didn't have a lot of control over what got I to do with my space and who I got to live with and all those things. And so I think that that's a big draw to the coops, beyond the ideology which I think most people are pretty interested in, but I think that there is a lot of interest in just the logistical structure of being able to make some decisions about your living space and what you're eating and things like that.
[01:01:37]
LG: Can you talk about like some anecdotes that you think of when you think back to your time in the coop like some stories that come to mind?
[01:01:50]
CD: Hm, well there's the whole Finlandia story. It definitely should be on record how the naming of Finlandia came about. And we've tried to preserve this in so many ways, and every time we go back and visit, people are like, Well I don't know why are we called, is it because of vodka I don't understand [laughs]. So, when we moved in it was called New House, alternatively spelled n-e-w or g-n-u depending on who was spelling it and who, you know there was an ongoing battle over this. Do we call it New House? And we were all sort of going, well this is really sort of stupid because we have this lofty goal that we're going to have all these other houses and you can't be New House. It's kind of like New Dorm, which I don't think they really call New Dorm anymore, but you know, things that there will be another new thing needs to have its own name at least eventually. Um, and there were several other names in the running, I can't remember what they were, so none of them were particularly striking. But amongst the random things in our living room or the dining room, the dining room had those glass cabinets, and I don't know whether this was left from somebody who had been there previously or how it got there but there was this record and we had a record player in there. And there was this record of Finnish...Polish...Finnish polka music called "Dance Finlandia". And my friend, Rita, who was my roommate, was Russian, and so she taught us all to polka. And so we would polka to "Dance Finlandia" and then we adopted that as the name for our intramural soccer team, was "Dance Finlandia", and it just sort of like, there was a subset of this that lived in the house that just kept pushing this and pushing this and pushing this. And then when things kind of fell apart and everyone scattered to the four winds, that some of the...Kevin Jewell and I were the only original people who moved back into the house I think after that year when we'd all moved out and we moved back in. And we just called it Finlandia from the start, and people were like, Oh, well that must be the name, okay, [laughs]. So it was, it was sort of a coup because the people who had been living in, maybe I have the city of Providence to thank for this for dispersing us, but the people who had been living in the house when that newer group of us moved in in '95 was really not as excited about the Finlandia name, but then once everyone slipped back and t e only people that moved back in were people that had been part of that Finlandia-pushing group, we managed to get it in and then I don't think it was really ever questioned after that. Um, so that's good I like that.
[01:05:00]
LG: We heard that it had been because someone brought a flight bottle of the Finlandia vodka in, and someone had decided. So it's interesting to hear...about the polka [laughs]
[01:05:11]
CD: [laughs] Yes. No, it's all about the polka. I wish we had that record, and I think it's long since disappeared as I'm sure has the record player. But it's pretty cool to have a record player in the dining room. Um, what else, God there are so many random little things. I'm trying to think if there are any other good stories, they all kind of blend together, and unfortunately the big stories are those like Oh, the lease is terminated, Oh you're being evicted. Those ones panned out...[laughs]
[01:05:45]
LG: [laughs] It doesn't have to be big stuff...
CD: Yeah, those are, those are kind of unforgettable. I'm trying to think if there are any good stories about Watermyn from when I was living there. But Watermyn's always been the sort of stable, adult sibling of the coops. It always just had its' shit together more than the other ones did and or at least that's the way that it was when I was there. Milhous and Carberry were the more radical elements and Watermyn was fondly referred to as where old coopers go to die. So everyone who was still like, I like this coop thing but I'm getting tired of all the drama they would move to Watermyn. And then Finlandia of course was just getting started and so none of us had any sort of idea of what was going on or what we should be doing, so it was a little bit more chaotic in that way. But, I guess I'm at a loss for good Watermyn stories, because at least from my recollection things just were always so calm, and went the way they were supposed to.
[01:07:02]
LG: Umm, let's see, so, can you talk a little bit about, just to rewind...how you got to Brown?
CD: How I got to Brown?
LG: Yeah, or what the decision was for that..?
[01:17:17]
CD: Well, quite honestly, they gave me the best financial aid package of anybody and it was cheaper to go there than anywhere else. And it was, I applied to several schools, all kind of East, Mid-, Midwest, East, schools: Oberlin and Grinnell and Hampshire and Brown. And then um yeah that really did actually come down to the final decision, because I wanted to go to Oberlin more than I wanted to go to Brown but it was cheaper for me to go to Brown so I said, Okay, that works for me, and um, I'm really actually very glad that I did. I think I'm sure that I would have been really happy at Oberlin, but I really liked having the city of Providence and all the things that came with that. And getting to know that space and being at a bigger school ended up being a better match for me once it all played out.
[01:08:24]
LG: And, I know I asked you a little bit more about the organizational structure, but can you elaborate more on the specific houses? Like were the houses more separated or did people work together a lot? What were the food coops like? Were things still run by consensus; how did that function?
[01:08:45]
CD: Mmmhmm, oh yeah, everything was run by consensus. And, the houses were pretty independent but there was definitely a lot of share between them. Milhous and Carberry certainly were kind of like the twins in the family because they were so close together that there was just naturally a lot of overlap between them, where people were going from one to another and doing various social and work kinds of things together. People really did work together and rally together for things, and we had kind of coop wide events. We had this sort of, we had a blind date party in '95-'96 year and so everybody that lived in the coops had to draw the name of somebody else who lived in the house and set them up with a blind date. Then it was like a rotating party, so we had appetizers at Finlandia and then we had dinner at Watermyn and then we had dessert at Carberry and drinks or music or something at Milhous. So there were a lot of things that we did in conjunction with each other and as the whole group when we would do outside things. Every year we would send people to NASCO and that would end up being a mix of people from all the houses. When you're trapped with people in a minivan for the drive from Rhode Island to Michigan, you can't really help but get to know them and interact with them [laughs] a lot and that would carry back to once we all returned to our homes we would still have that intermingling. And it's also just because of the way the housing lottery was set up you would go into the coop lottery with friends maybe beyond just your roommate that you're planning to live with, but a group of people, and then you might get split up between the houses. And that would lead to kind of that cross-pollination and getting to know what the other houses were about. And then the food coops, I don't know, they were...in existence and there was always, they were I think they were really great that there was always some tension with food coopers and how much did they have to be invested in the house and how much did they have to follow the rules and where the hell are they? They're not here cooking dinner. And you can't just go to their room and knock on the door, was something that would come up, but it was good, it was good to have, I mean it's good to have a bigger group for the food purchase sharing, the costs of it, and then sharing the responsibility for preparing food. But, it would get interesting when there would occasionally be some tension between house members and food coopers in terms of, mostly in terms of responsibilities and time spent on things.
[01:12:09]
LG: Mmhmm, and you mentioned NASCO. What was BACH's relationship to NASCO and connection to it, or if there was one to the greater cooperative movement and this, did you guys see yourselves within that, how did that play out?
[01:12:25]
CD: Yeah I definitely think we saw ourselves as part of that, and people were always interested in sharing information about other cooperative movements and how the ideology worked and those sorts of things. And like I said people got really involved with AS220 when that was started and other sort of cooperative means of living or working. We went to NASCO every year, we weren't hugely hugely involved beyond that. My senior year NASCO sent me to the future coop business leaders thing in DC, so we did have some overarching communication and work that we did with them, but we weren't really involved in the national organization beyond sending the meetings every year. Ging to Anne Arbor and from that sort of learning about folks that were in other coops around the country and now you know I live in Austin, and the ICC-Austin is this sort of huge mammoth coop living structure. They have this ginormous apartment building that's run as a coop, but it's huge, I mean, I don't know how many people live there but it's it looks like an apartment building, an apartment complex or a dorm almost. And then they have some smaller houses and things like that but it was kind of fun to move here after having met people, obviously people who are no longer in the system here at all but I knew of Austin from that, from meeting folks at NASCO, and I knew there was a big cooperative movement at the University here.
[01:14:28]
LG: Um, What, uh sorry, to go back to um the parties? [laughs]
CD: Oh yes, we love parties.
LG: What was happening, was the Naked Party happening? When did Findy start having the Halloween party?
[01:14:46]
CD: Oh, I didn't know that! Um, well Finlandia must have picked up the Halloween party in sort of the absence of Watermyn, I mean in the absence of Milhous' existence I guess. That wasn't happening when I was there. So I don't know, it must have started after '98. And the naked party yes, it was still going strong when I was there, all up through my senior year and everything was yeah, that was great. That was always one of the best parties of the year, because a, people are kind of more selectively invited, and b, just because it's fun because you realize that everybody's naked and that you don't care and you're not really even paying attention to the fact that everyone's naked and it just tended to end up being a sort of better party than the other parties. Is it still, happening, yes?
[01:15:56]
LG: Yeah...
CD: Good [laughs] it wouldn't be Watermyn without naked people. Oh god, okay so here's an anecdote. So after the naked party my...the year that, the fall that I was living in Watermyn, somebody said, You know what? It shouldn't just be the naked party, our house should be clothing optional allthe time. We should not have to wear clothes at Watermyn, and of course that was like a five hour long house meeting [laughs]. I don't know how do I feel about this, what about if people come over, what if people come to visit, what...I mean, I don't really want to see you naked everyday, all these things. And we finally decided, someone proposed that we have naked Fridays, so Fridays would be clothing optional, not mandatory naked but clothing optional and then somebody pointed out that Friday might not be the best day because if people are really concerned about visitors and guests you're more likely to have people that are visiting you for the weekend and that are getting there on Friday, so naked Thursdays became the rule, so Thursdays were clothing optional for at least a semester. And there were only certain people who really took advantage of that, but they did, and so you'd go down for breakfast in the morning and be like, Oh there's naked people in the kitchen [laughs] okay I have to get to class or whatever, and that, it was a short lived experiment. I don't think that it really went as well as the people who were advocating clothing optional household, I think that they were really hoping that it would be a little more pervasive and widespread and there really were only about three people who did it on a regular basis and that just kind of creates a weird dynamic, because it's fun to be naked when everybody's naked but it's a little weird to be naked when there are five clothed people in the room, but...they were very comfortable with themselves, so, it was no big deal, I think, but it didn't really last longer than...I don't think it probably even lasted for the whole semester, but it lasted for several weeks at least, so, good interesting lesson in all living together and all just sort of going well, I'm not going to be naked right now but, have fun.
[01:18:18]
LG: Um, so as far as the board goes, and gender, what was the gender balance of decision making, like was board proportional to gender in the houses, did house jobs play out in gender stereotypes, like what was the organizational balance of those things?
[01:18:42]
CD: Well, I think that they were probably pretty proportionate, I think that there were three or so board members who were men and the rest of us was women, which was probably pretty comparable to the houses and then, house jobs were really across the board, I guess that food purchasing and food distribution is a more typically female job but I don't...I don't think that it played out that way, I think that it was pretty evenly split from what I can recollect of living in the houses, and maintenance, too, was, um, usually there were usually women on the maintenance teams at all the houses, I don't know which other, I just can't remember what the house jobs were, treasurer and things like that, but I can't think of what their assigned gender roles would even be [laughs], so...I think that people were pretty good about dividing things equally and not, there was never a sense that the men would do all the construction work and the women would do all the cooking
[01:20:11]
LG: When...where was BACH...you said that the BACH office was located in Milhous I think for al little while, when did it move and why?
[01:20:20]
CD: It moved from the third floor tiny room opposite the pig room which was, there were these two ridiculously small, like I mentioned before basically the size of a twin bed and then a couple feet on either side these rooms in Milhous on the third floor facing, let's see I can't remember the name of any streets, facing that street that Milhous faces, not Brook, but the other one. And, they the pig room was named such because supposedly someone at that point had a pet pig that they kept up there, that was before my time, so that was a legend and a rumor before I even got other and I cannot even vouch for its authenticity. But, they were basically considered too small to be living spaces except in times of dire emergency like a house being closed down and needing to throw people somewhere really fast, so but when Milhous was closed, the office moved to the Finlandia basement into space, because that was no longer living space, we weren't allowed to have people living in the basement because they would be enveloped in flames and never be able to get out if there happened to be a fire. And so, that became office space because we had so much space down there and it wasn't allowed to be used for living.
[01:21:55]
LG: Um, so no other little fragments that you feel summarize or capture coop life?
[01:22:08]
CD: [laughs]You know, none come to mind, I'm sure I'll think of things later this afternoon I'll be like, Oh I should have told them about the time that that we stole the giant wok from Milhous, which we actually did one year, we...Milhous and Finlandia got into some sort of weird battle, I don't know why we having turf wars I don't know why we were having turf wars but we were. And, um, we went over there, one night and snuck into their kitchen and stole they had this gigantic wok that you could fit like several small children in if you wanted to or sled down the hill in it or something, it was huge it took up he whole stove. And so we stole that, and ran it back, back down to Finlandia, and I think we left them an Alannis Morrissette CD in exchange [laughs]. That was a great moment. Yeah, there are all sorts of little random tidbits like that that I am sure that I'll think of and wish that I had mentioned that not many of them are coming to mind right now, unfortunately.
[01:23:16]
LG: Um, do you know anything about, the decision to spell Watermyn with a 'y'?
CD: It happened before I moved in, but it was just sort of a, in that whole time span when the, with looking at the use of men in various words and the masculinization of words because of men existing in them and it was just kind of a, I think it started out as being kind of a tongue-in-cheek thing and then it just kind of caught on and nobody changed it.
[01:24:04]
LG: And, do you think that the coop served as like sort of a hotbed of political activity or like radicalism or do you just sort of view it as something that people went to just because? I mean you talked about people being drawn to the ideology, but do you think that it fostered something in people or they just did because they could?
[01:24:27]
CD: I think you saw both things in people, I think that there were certainly those for whom this was a big political statement that they were living in this kind of context and that they were going to use that to...to foster other or to move to other issues and within that there were people that liked living in a house and being able to cook your won food and those two things would come to odds sometimes, where there would be an argument over, you know, is this space inherently political? Does it? Should it be? Or, should it be more open to anyone who wants to live this kind of way even if they want to eat meat or don't' want to recycle or whatever the issue of the day is, they want to have their SUV, there weren't SUVs back then [laughs] but I'm sure that that is something that would come up now or it would be, by the very existence of your automobile you exemplify these things that we should stand against and then it's a matter of, well is that really true? Or can you have some of the things but not all of them? Do you have to agree with radical leftist views on every issue in order to be a good cooper or can you agree with some of them and be more moderate on others, and agree with some of them but not feel like you need to make it your life's work to draw attention to that issue and bring it out and can you do that and still live in the coops and be a good cooper. I think it was an ongoing struggle and I imagine that it still is, this idea of, what is there a creed that you have to subscribe to in order to be part of it, and for some people it seems like there is, and they really believe, well this is a space for us to bring people together that agree on this one issue and should agree on all these others, and for other people it's a real different idea that you can agree on this one issue and have very different views on all of these other issues and you shouldn't be kind of forced to subscribe to a world view that, that's prescribe these things just because you want to live cooperatively and live in community. Or, and you know, the flip side, the other argument to that is well we have this group of people that's living in community and so they should be working for the greater good and they should be using their collective numbers as a way to make things change in the rest of society.
[01:27:47]
LG: Um, how did people's identities as students play out within that, um, like, were people against community members or other non-Brown students being there or..?
[01:28:00]
CD: Being around in the coops?
LG: Yeah
CD: Well people were always around in a peripheral sense, I do remember some conversations about food cooping, I think this was at Watermyn. Should we have coopers who are just general community members or should we not? And if we do should it just be those community members who find out about us or should we actively be recruiting people from the surrounding community and presenting this option to them? And I honestly don't remember the entirety of those conversations about that but the outcome at least while I was there, was that everybody who was involved was a member of the Brown community even if they were sort of only a member of the peripheral Brown community; they had dated someone who went to Brown or they had gone to Brown and dropped out a couple years ago or something. We never had in my experience, anybody who was just kind of off the street, Hey I happened to be walking by and I live a couple blocks away and work at wherever and I have nothing to do with this community, that we didn't have anyone like that who was involved during the time that I was there that I knew of.
[01:29:45]
LG: Well, okay, do you have any other things to say? That you just didn't think of that we didn't get to before we finish?
[01:29:58]
CD: Not really, I mean I think it's great that the coops are still going and have faced a lot of challenges and gotten through them. I guess I do think that kind of organization will always be a challenge because of the high turnover rate, and like I said I was on the board of advisors and then just sort of stopped hearing from folks, and I have at various times just emailed Bach coordinator at brown.edu and sort of said, Who are you now? And what's going on? And, you know, I'm still an alum and here's my address. And yet I don't get the newsletter so I don't know if it's cause the newsletter doesn't exist anymore or it's because there's this just lack of coordination with mailing addresses and things like that. I do know that there are a lot of folks out there who really got a lot out of their time at the coops and would be really interested in knowing what's going on and staying involved in some sort of way. I do think that any sort of things that can draw alumni back in are sort of going to be a really positive thing just, even just learning about the histories. I know that I loved it when people would stumble back and be like, I lived here ten years ago and this was like this and this room used to be over here and this wall didn't exist and you know, all of those, it's just fascinating to know that those histories exist and to find a way to keep them connected.
[01:31:46]
LG: Mmmhmm, uh, something I just thought of, do you, do you know of any like existing strong alumni relationships, is there a movement to keep people in touch and keep an idea of this sort of community even if people are sort of spread around the country, or do you know...?
[01:32:04]
CD: Uh, well, my group from, or a large portion of my group form that Finlandia year is still in touch, three of us live in Austin and see each other pretty regularly. When I first moved here I randomly ran into some who had lived in Milhous that I knew, but I think he's moved away, but there are...five or six of us that, from that first Finlandia year that keep in pretty close touch and then probably ten of us who keep in, or ten or twenty of us maybe, ten, fifteen, that keep in kind of loose touch with each other and try and track each other down and find each other. But I think that there are still some other connections because I think that there's a, one of my friends who lives here was in New York a couple summers ago and managed to hook up with a significant number of former coopers from that time span, so they must be, the NY, sort of mid-to late 90s group that's in touch with each other. So I don't think there's a huge effort or movement, but I think that people establish really close friendships and that continues to play out even when they start spreading out and moving around. I don't think it's in any sort of concrete like let's be cooperative about anything sort of way [laughs], but people are still real social.
[01:33:48]
LG: Okay, and I just forgot to say this before so I'm just going to say it now, and it's 12:42 on Sunday, March 12th.
[01:33:56]